Etymology
by Quill of Molliemon
Summary: AU, post-Kakashi Gaiden, pre-Naruto, TWO-SHOT. A very young Naruto exploits a loophole and makes a flawed assumption. His mother is dismayed. His father thinks its hysterical. Read, review, and enjoy!
1. Part I

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the manga/anime _Naruto_ and I make no money in writing this…so please don't sue.

**Notes:** AU, _**one-shot**_, post-_Kakashi Gaiden_, pre-_Naruto_—Naruto is five years old or thereabouts. Not really related to anything else I've written so far. Read, review, and enjoy!

**Edit (12/20/14):** Now a _**two-shot**_!

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><p><strong>Etymology<br>**_Part I_

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><p><em><span>Etymology<span>__**:**__ The study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time._

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><p><em>"Say that word again and I'll wash out your mouth with soap!"<em>

One of the most important lessons that Naruto had learned so far in his short, young life was that his mother's threats of punishment weren't empty. When she said that she'd spank him if he sprayed her flowerbeds with the weed killer that killed anything green, she _would_ spank him. When she promised to ground him if he lied about stealing the cookies, she _would_ ground him. And when she informed him that his mouth would be washed out with soap if he repeated any naughty words, she _would_ wash his mouth out with soap.

But it wasn't fair!

Adults said naughty words all the time without having to worry about gargling soap. It was a sign of adult-ness to say the restricted words. And it was a sign of baby-ness to be forbidden uttering those special words. Naruto wasn't a baby—he was going to be a ninja!

Swearing was important to ninjas. It enhanced their toughness and meanness in addition to declaring their adult status. Even the youngest ninja swore all the time without reprimand. Stringing together the dirty words was practically an art among ninja! The amazing things that Naruto heard when he snuck around the fringes of the training fields set his imagination on fire.

He ached to practice this vital skill…but soap tasted nasty and gross, so he didn't dare.

But then Kiba let him in on a super-secret loophole.

If he took a naughty word and changed it just a little tiny bit into something not-naughty, he could say them all he wanted without consequences!

"Damn" became "darn". "Shit" became "shoot". "Crap" became "crud".

Naruto, Sasuke, and Kiba had been seriously debating the proper adjustment of a _very_ naughty word that started with the letter "F" one day when Sasuke's older brother, Itachi, had stumbled across them. The much older and wiser boy had sternly warned them to not even try to modify the word in question. If the mothers ever figured out what they meant when they said "frick" or "fudge" or "freak" they would get punished anyway.

And so the largest and most colorful set of swears was lost to them until everyone else decided they were grown-up enough to not be subject to a soapy punishment.

It was horribly disappointing, but Naruto didn't let it bother him for very long. He resolved to uncover a naughty word that he could secretly use that was unique. He dreamed of a word or a phrase that would be all his own, and secretly filthy.

After much thought, he felt that he had uncovered the perfect word. It was something that his mother said sometimes when she was angry or excited or both. Whenever she was caught saying it, she would get embarrassed, like all adults got when they accidentally let one of the forbidden words slip in front of a kid. No one else seemed to say it, or even to know it…so it was absolutely perfect.

A week of secret experimentation led him to the modification that would make it safe to say in front of his mother and other adults.

The first time he tried it, his mother jumped and stared at him, but she gave him no warning. The next time he uttered it, Kakashi-nii-san stared at him, snorted like it was sort of funny, and went back to the paper-covered book that he wasn't supposed to read around Naruto. And the third time he tried it, just to be safe, his father had looked at him oddly before smiling, patting his head, and sending him off to play.

So Naruto made his special secretly-naughty word a part of his everyday speech. It became a place-filler when his mouth stumbled to spit out words fast enough. It expressed his anger, his excitement, his approval, his disapproval, his any-strong-emotion. It punctuated his sentences better than any exclamation point.

But then, one day, his father asked where that word had come from.

His dad—the _second_ most super-awesome Hokage ever, because Naruto was going to be _even better_ than him one day!—had been sitting at his huge desk, sorting countless stupid papers that were somehow too important to doodle on or practice origami with. Naruto had been sitting in a corner coloring in a coloring book because he was grounded from the playground for breaking a couple of things, and if he didn't stay here he'd have to go run errands with his mom. Frustrated that his picture wasn't turning out like he'd imagined and then by two crayons breaking in a row, he'd used his word, and then his dad had asked about it.

Reluctantly, and very carefully, Naruto explained it.

His male parental unit stared at him. Then his mouth twitched. Then he grinned. Then he chuckled. Then he laughed. Then he tried to stop laughing but he couldn't so he slapped his desk, clutched his stomach, and laughed harder.

"What's so funny?" his mother asked, stealing his question as she strode into the Hokage's office with a few small shopping bags from different stores hanging from her hands.

His father stopped laughing, stared at his mother, and then started laughing all over again.

"What?" his mother demanded, brushing a loose strand of super-long red hair behind one ear.

His dad tried to answer, but he was laughing so hard he was having trouble breathing.

"Naruto," she dropped her dark purplish-blue eyes down to him, "do you know what he's laughing about?"

"No," the whiskered boy answered with complete honesty. "I have no idea what I said that made him laugh."

She raised an eyebrow. "And what did you say?"

Naruto hesitated and fiddled with his broken orange crayon, but then his mom got the look on her face that meant that if he didn't answer quick she'd get mad…so he repeated his explanation.

"What word was your father asking about?" she asked with a hint of menace, like she was thinking it was that F-word that couldn't even be hinted at.

"_Dattebayo_!" Naruto exclaimed hurriedly.

His female parental unit stared at him. Then her brow furrowed. Then she frowned. Then she sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose like her head hurt. Then she reached into one of her shopping bags, pulled out a new sandal, and threw it at his dad's head.

His normally calm and quiet father was laughing so hard it sounded like he was crying and when the sandal hit him he slipped out of his swivel chair and slumped to the floor where he wheezed for breath between even more laughs.

"Mom," Naruto tugged anxiously at her sleeve. "I still don't get it. What's so funny?"

Being left out of a super-funny joke was a lot more awful and unfair than being forbidden to use naughty words.

"Let's go home so your father can collect himself," she sniffed, motioning for him to grab his coloring book and crayon box. "I'll explain as we walk, okay?" She shook her head and readjusted his shopping bags and muttered to herself in dismay. "He really _is_ my son, _dattebane_…"


	2. Part II

**Etymology  
><strong>_Part II_

"_What_ did you just say?"

Naruto blinked as he gazed down at his firstborn child in utter puzzlement.

Bolt Uzumaki, his mischievous blond-haired boy, looked back up at him with a curious mixture of innocence and defiance on his whisker-marked little face.

Since he was regrettably busy (damn, he wasn't even Hokage yet and it seemed like he was always busy!) he'd had to back out of taking Bolt around the village like he'd planned to earlier. Instead, Grandpa Namikaze had stepped in and turned the little Father-Son day into a Grandfather-Grandson day. And now, during a lunch break, Bolt's grandfather had brought him by to share their adventures so far, which had led to Bolt saying…

"I said that me an' Gran'pa saw Shikadai an' Inojin at the park an' we had a competition on the monkey bars, an' I totally won," Bolt repeated, careful to say it more slowly than he had the first time.

"Yeah, I got that," Naruto said with a slow nod. "But you left a word off at the end. What was it?"

"What word?" Bolt responded, doing his best to sound perfectly innocent (and failing).

"You know what I'm talking about," Naruto replied, folding his arms over his more formal orange jacket.

Bolt's innocent grin melted into a stubborn pout. "I said…_dattebasa_."

Naruto swallowed a sigh.

When his son had been born, his mother had warned him to clean up his language because babies were sponges. He hadn't taken it all that seriously and had been slow to cut back on the cursing and such. And he'd been very lax about sticking to proper modes of speech. So when Bolt started talking, his early sentences had mimicked his father's particular bad habit.

While he had no problems with his own…verbal eccentricity…he knew that it was an issue for some people. When he was meeting with a new client—especially one that was all 'high-class' and snooty—he could see them lowering their opinion of his competence the moment they heard him utter _that word_. He did his best to not let that word slip in front of strangers (there was no point to hold back among old friends and family) but it was such a habit that it was hard.

And it wasn't a problem that he wanted his son to have. So he gently discouraged using _that word_ and redoubled his efforts to clean up his speech patterns. It was for Bolt's own good that he avoided this habit before it ever became a habit.

But now…

"…Now was that so hard to say?" Naruto chuckled and ruffled his son's wavy blond hair.

"Didn't want to get in trouble," the boy muttered and tried to fix his hair.

"In trouble?" Naruto blinked. "It's not like that's a bad word or anything." _He's not even saying it right._

"I know. I changed it so it isn't bad." Bolt wrinkled his nose. "I don't like the taste of soap."

"Soap?" Naruto repeated blankly. _…Has Mom turned uttering that word into a soap-worthy offense?_ "What—"

A choked sound interrupted his confused question and he glanced at the doorway of the tiny office. His father leaned against the doorframe (where he'd been waiting out of the way while Naruto did the parenting thing) with a hand clapped over his mouth, trying very hard to muffle his laughter. Or…maybe he was choking, which made more sense to Naruto since he was too baffled by the situation to find it funny.

"Uh, Dad…you okay?"

It took his father a good minute to regain enough of his composure to choke out an answer. "Yes…yes, I'm…I'm fine…I just remembered something."

"Remembered what?" Naruto wondered with a frown.

"Oh, something that you did when you were a little boy," his father wheezed and rubbed at the corners of his eyes.

"Eh?" Naruto rubbed at his whiskered cheek and tried to dredge up some memory that fit with the current situation, but he came up empty and was left feeling like a kid again where the references that adults spewed out flew clean over his head. "What was that?"

"Don't…don't worry about it," his father chuckled and shook his head. And then he turned and started to leave. "I'll be back."

Naruto frowned in confusion and concern as his father vanished down the hallway and around a corner.

_I really don't get what was so funny… It can't be that he's going senile—Dad's too young for that. …Isn't he?_

"So…I'm not in trouble, right?"

Naruto blinked and looked down into the hopeful face of his child. "I never said that you were in trouble, Bolt." He plopped down on a stool and gestured for the boy to take a seat on top of a box crammed with file folders. "Now, why were you worried about getting soap in your mouth?"

"Gran'ma always says that if she catches me sayin' dirty words she'd wash 'em outta my mouth with soap," Bolt replied gravely.

"Yeah," Naruto nodded with a half-grin. "That's what she told me when I was little, too! But…that word that you said wasn't dirty or bad…"

"Because I changed it," Bolt explained.

"Changed it from what?" Naruto wondered with a furrowed brow.

"From _datteba_—" Bolt hesitated. "From that bad word that you say sometimes, when you think I'm not around or I'm not listening."

Naruto blinked a few times. "What?"

"Mama always reminds you not to say it around me an' Himawari-chan," Bolt continued. "An' Gran'ma always scolds you for it. You an' Mama an' Gran'ma an' Gran'pa an' Gran'father say that I shouldn't say that word…so it has to be a bad one!"

Naruto stared at his offspring for a minute.

"Bolt," he said slowly. "It's not like that. It—"

The buzzing ring of his cell phone cut into his sentence and Naruto hurriedly dug the electronic device out of his pocket.

"Hello?"

_"Naruto-kun?"_ his wife's gentle voice drifted into his ear. _"Are you busy?"_

"Nah," he chuckled with a warm smile. "Bolt and I were just having a little chat."

_"Did he have fun with your father today?"_ Hinata asked.

"It sounds like it," Naruto replied. "How's our little sunflower?"

_"I just put her down for her afternoon nap,"_ she answered. _"A-ano…Naruto-kun?"_

"What?" Naruto felt a bit of tension coil in his stomach. "Something wrong?"

As a child, his wife had suffered with very poor self-confidence which had manifested in the ways that she would fidget with her fingers and a bit of a stutter in her words. As she had grown and found her self-worth, those nervous traits had faded as she'd blossomed into a beautiful and strong young woman. Now, when the infrequent stutter returned to her voice, he took it to mean that either she was very embarrassed about something, or…there was something potentially serious that was bothering her.

_"I don't think so…"_ she said, her voice uncertain. _"It's just… Your father turned up a minute ago and said something to your mother and…she started tugging at her hair and moaning about karma and-and an Uzumaki curse? Do you know what that's about, Naruto-kun?"_

"No." Naruto sighed and dragged a frustrated hand over his face. "Er, well, maybe… Bolt said something that just about killed Dad, but he didn't really explain what was so darn funny about it."

_"Oh? What did he say?"_

"He said '_dattebasa_'—"

"It's not a bad word!" Bolt loudly interrupted, practically jumping into Naruto's lap to be sure that his young voice would be picked up by the cell phone. "I didn't curse, Mama—I promise!"

"I didn't say that you did!" Naruto sputtered as he juggled his child and the phone. "I was just explaining—"

_"Goodness!"_

"What?" Naruto pressed the phone tighter to his ear. "Hinata, what is it?"

_"Your father's started laughing and…your mother's hitting his shoulder with her shoe and insisting that it isn't funny and that she tried so hard to 'break the cycle'…and your father just keeps laughing!"_ Hinata hesitated and Naruto could almost see her fidgeting with the phone cord. _"She's also been saying more '_dattebane'_s' than I've ever heard before. …Naruto-kun, do you have any idea what's going on?"_

Naruto sighed deeply. "No, but I really wish that I did, _dattebayo_…"

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><p><strong>Author's Notes:<strong>Now, there was some stuff that I found weird and iffy in _Naruto 700_, but overall I enjoyed the ending. I loved the NaruHina, I accepted the SasuSaku (although I kinda wished that Sasuke didn't get any girl and died alone in a ditch…but whatever), and the Chouji/Karui was completely out of left field, but Chouchou is adorable and I'd never mentally paired Chouji with anyone anyway so I'm totally fine with it. But when Bolt popped up and started talking, I immediately remembered _Etymology_ and thought: "I can do more with this!"

So I did.

Hope you all enjoyed it!


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